


Coming Home

by mrstotten



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-24
Updated: 2012-06-24
Packaged: 2017-11-08 11:50:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/442908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrstotten/pseuds/mrstotten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set directly after the Season Two finale. Sam’s thoughts on his father, Dean, and what it means to come home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coming Home

For most of his life Sam struggled to understand what home meant to him. As a kid, moving from one motel to the next, the towns schools teachers and friends all blurred together, until they were indistinguishable from one another. Home was just a word written on the inside of a hallmark card; an ideal constantly longed after, but never truly understood. 

The idea of a perfect home invoked images of smiling mothers, the smell of warm apple pie and the feeing of being safe and secure. But that wasn’t their world. Theirs was a world made up of snarling monsters. A life filled with the putrid stench of decay; and the dull crack of rock salt being fired from guns that left their ears ringing and their hearts racing. A world where monsters didn’t live in the cupboard, but skulked around each corner, watching and waiting for the day that their father slipped up, so they could slide in with teeth and claws.

Sam realised early on that this wasn’t the life he wanted. He needed more, longed for stability and normality. Determined to eke an existence away from the life his father made for them, he immersed himself in studying. Nights were filled with books, papers, and research; anything that could distract him from the daily horror of his actual existence. 

To him, leaving for Stanford wasn’t leaving home. It was escape; liberation, freedom from his own personal hell. No matter how much he loved his father and brother, their life was everything he needed to break away from.

With Jess, he believed that he’d finally found everything he’d longed for. That he finally understood the concept of home. Returning to their apartment night after night, the word took on a new meaning. Out for drinks with friends, the quiet murmurings of going home made him feel happy, settled, andsafe.

After Jess’s death he thought he would miss that, the normalcy of having somewhere to call home. But back on the road with Dean, slipping into old habits and routines, he soon realised that although he missed Jess with a constant dull ache, he could barely remember what their apartment looked like. As much as he pretended otherwise, that apartment was no different from the countless nameless, faceless motels.

His father’s death and his brother making a deal with the devil had made Sam finally understand what home meant to him. 

Sam patched up the multitude of wounds on his brothers back, while Dean sat and swigged heavily from a bottle of whiskey, the ‘Winchester anaesthetic’. Sam listened to the gravelly tone of his brother’s voice, as he discussed their next move in catching the countless creatures that had now been released from hell.

With half his mind on the conversation, and the other half running through what he knew of crossroads demons, Sam thought of what home meant to him.

He finally understood that it wasn’t white picket fences, and smiling families. Home was wrapped up in green eyes and sardonic smiles; it was the smell of gunfire, whiskey, and the sweat of leather. Home was the gruff worried tones of a man who had already lost too much, and who would kill to protect those he had left. Home was the bonds of a family so close that not even hell could keep them from protecting each other. 

Sam now realized that the city, the state, hell the country didn’t matter. Wherever Dean was, that was home, and Sam was going to make damn sure that nothing took that from him.

Now that Sam had finally found home, he wasn’t going to stand idly by and watch it be ripped away. He was going to get Dean out of this deal, regardless of the consequences.


End file.
